Density functional theory has been used to investigate the adsorption and dissociation of 5-hydroxy-3-hexanediol-1,4-naphthaquinone (Jug-C4-thiol) at a coverage of p(4 × 4) on a Au(111) surface. Both physisorption and chemisorption processes are investigated. For each process, the surface energy potential is explored by an exhaustive test of the adsorption site. The most favorable site is found to be face-centered cubic. The adsorption energies are less than − 0.20 eV in the case of physisorption, while they range from − 1.70 to − 1.92 eV for chemisorption. The effect of the naphthoquinone function is negligible in the adsorption process. The alkyl chain inhibits electron delocalization between the surface and the conjugated head of the molecule. Analysis of the bonding shows the formation of two ionocovalent bonds between the sulfur and the gold atoms. The thermodynamics and kinetics of S–H bond dissociation are studied. The results reveal that adsorption involves a dissociation path in which a hydrogen atom moves to the most neighboring site and a hydrogen atom migrates to its most stable site. The maximum barrier energy of the first step is less than 2.7 eV while the migration barrier does not exceed 0.5 eV.

In this work, we present detailed investigations of methanethiol adsorption on a Cu(4 1 0) surface within the framework of the self-consistent first-principles calculations as implemented in the Vienna ab initio simulation package (VASP). In particular, the adsorption sites, the surface coverage rate and electronic properties have been determined and compared to experimental values. The results indicate that the favorable adsorption site in the case of low coverage rate is a bridge on the step followed by the hollow site on the terrace. The adsorption significantly affects the outermost layer of the surface mainly for a higher coverage rate in a (2 × 2) supercell. The nature of the chemisorption process on the surface is analyzed by means of the density of states which, combined with charge density difference and atomic charge calculations, confirms the ionic character of the S-Cu bond. The specific effect of the presence of steps is highlighted by comparing the adsorption on the (1 0 0) terrace to the adsorption on the extended Cu(1 0 0) surface. Compared to the flat Cu(1 0 0), it is found here that while the stability is almost the same at p(2 × 2) coverage, the CH3S/Cu(4 1 0) becomes more stable than CH3S/Cu(1 0 0) at c(2 × 2) coverage with 0.30 eV per molecule. The mechanism of methanethiol dissociation is explored by the nudged elastic band method and demonstrates that the most favorable path is dissociation followed by migration of hydrogen from the step to its most stable position (hollow on the terrace) with energy barriers less than 0.5 eV.

In this paper, we use density functional theory with dispersion correction functional (DFT-D) as implemented in the Vienna ab initio simulation package in order to investigate hydrogen adsorption on graphane (GH) and fluorographene (GF).